A few nights ago, just at bedtime, my husband and I heard some kind of owl — at least we assumed it was an owl — announcing its presence among the oaks in our backyard. A little research on the Internet led us to believe it was a screech owl. I was excited because I'm a budding bird enthusiast; my husband was excited because he saw an end to his mole problems. According to what he read, once an owl establishes a territory, he will hunt it over until he exhausts the prey.
Unfortunately, as we waxed eloquent about the bloody demise of the rodents tunneling through our yard, my six-year-old son overheard and burst into tears over the slaughter of his friends whom he pronounced “tiny and shiny black.” “Isn't there enough room for the owl and mole and us?” he wondered.
It was the Hanover, Va., version of Rodney King's “Why can't we all just get along?”
The simple answer, of course, is that we just can't. What the mole wants and what the owl wants and what my husband wants are in irreconcilable conflict. Of course, the promise of Scripture is that this will not always be so. At the consummation of the kingdom of God, the mole and the owl will lie down together, and they and the gardener will be reconciled members of the peaceable kingdom, not varying levels in the food chain.
But what about the meantime?
Memorial Day has come and gone. The sad fact is that for most of us, it was a day when we failed to remember. For most of us, it was a day off, the first trip to the beach or pool, the unofficial beginning of summer. Any remembrance of the lives given and taken was perfunctory, at best. Just as, for most of us, the current war in Iraq has made very little difference in our day-to-day lives.
But might it be otherwise?
The results of a recent survey of Muslim Americans were an occasion for “good news/bad news” commentary. For me, the most intriguing reaction involved the statistic that sizable portions of the Islamic population regard themselves as Muslims first and as U.S. citizens second. At least one Christian pundit viewed this as a cause for alarm, since he viewed it as a threat to peace. He reasoned that unless we can all agree about what we value most, it will be extremely unlikely that we all can get along. Therefore, it is our duty to subordinate that which divides to that which unites us. I would state his opinion more bluntly: If we as Christians or Muslims or Americans want peace, then we must be willing to kill other Christians or Muslims who don't happen to be Americans.
Here is a profound failure of the Christian imagination. Here is the poverty of Christian memory in 21st-century America. An argument I often encounter from my students is that our freedom to worship has been purchased at the price of the blood of our fellow citizens, therefore we owe our nation our allegiance. My response is that as precious as those lost lives are, if our country tomorrow withdrew that freedom, would we cease to worship?
It is my conviction that the church is not better, purer or more virtuous than the world that surrounds it. It is that the church knows the one thing that someday all the world will acknowledge. In Jesus, God has broken the walls of enmity that separate us from each other and from God. And we are called to live in witness to this peace.
Will we pledge allegiance to that?
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— Beth Newman is professor of theology and ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. [email protected]